The Red Cross said that 200 people died during clashes...

The Red Cross said that 200 people died during clashes in Kaduna. However, the relocation of the Miss World Contest away from the Nigerian capital Abuja dealt a resounding setback to the process of democracy in Nigeria, Hands Off Cain said.HOC had urged contestants not to heed calls for a boycott prompted by the death-by-stoning sentence for Amina Lawal, but rather go to Nigeria to state their opposition to the death penalty there. HOC insisted the contest should go ahead because cancelling it would mean giving in to the same fundamentalist extremism that not only condemned a woman to death for giving birth out of wedlock but also used violence to force the removal of an event it opposed. Expressing sorrow for the deaths of over 200 people following riots sparked by a newspaper article about the Miss World pageant, HOC called on Europe and other democratic countries not to turn their back on the fledgling democracy in Nigeria that had been severely weakened by the latest outbreak of sectarian violence that left more than 2,000 people dead in Kaduna in 2000."The extremists have been successful in their intent of weakening a Government that has been trying to foster a young democracy after thirty years of military dictatorships," an HOC statement said."President Olusegun Obasanjo and his government have been trying to govern with tolerance a diversity of cultures and religions in a population of 130 million people, more or less equally divided between Christians and Muslims. "His country has been criminalized even though no stoning sentence has been carried out, and for this reason HOC believed that a boycott would have hurt a government that has been trying to stop such punishments. It would have been a different matter if it was public security concerns that prompted contestants to stay away in the first place."Regarding Nigeria, Europe has been blind: the Spanish government, for example, gave a warm welcome to the President Mohammed Khatami of Iran, where at least 18 women have been stoned during his tenure alone, while the Parliament was asking Miss Spain to boycott a contest in a country that has not stoned anybody."Europe and other Western countries have to decide whether to leave Nigeria to its fate and risk the onset of fundamentalism, or to support the democratic forces there."